1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a musical instrument and, more particularly, to an electronic organ with a manually driven band.
2. Description of the Related Art
Several designs for musical instruments have been designed in the past. None of them, however, include a manually driven band with perforations for selectively actuating note sensors that permit the band to move forward as well as backwards to play the notes in both directions.
It is a known practice for disk jockies (DJs) to “scratch” the vinyl sound recording to mix sounds with the music being played. See generally en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scratching (last visited on Oct. 11, 2013). With the original vinyl records a DJ would cause the record to play backwards (temporarily) purportedly enhancing the beat of the music. Independently from the timing of the resulting sound, the notes are not played backwards but rather awkward sounds are generated. This practice is more difficult to implement with compact discs (CDs) and impossible with other digital music formats (MP3s, etc.) thus requiring elaborate “scratching” software to be developed. The present invention provides a novel feature for scratching with true selective playback capabilities of the notes and sounds preprogrammed on a driving band.
Applicant believes that the closest reference corresponds to U.S. Pat. No. 1,600,160 issued to Bartholome for a pneumatic playing device for musical instruments. Bartholome's device includes a band that is used to actuate the note sensors. However, it differs from the present invention because it cannot play the sequence of songs backwards and is not capable of playing several instruments simultaneously. As it will be shown below, the present invention also permits a user to play different instruments simultaneously, change instruments at any time or selectively silence one or more of these instruments.
Other documents describing the closest subject matter provide for a number of more or less complicated features that fail to solve the problem in an efficient and economical way. None of these patents suggest the novel features of the present invention.